Salesforce Buy Tableau BI & Big Data Firm For $15.7 billion
Salesforce Inc. agreed to buy data-analytics platform Tableau Software Inc. for more than $15.5 billion in stock, making its largest-ever acquisition as it fights off rivals challenging its dominance in that help companies understand their customers.
The all-stock deal would be the largest acquisition in the history of the San Francisco-based cloud giant, more than double the $6.5 billion Salesforce paid for MuleSoft last year.
Tableau BI services will remain based in Seattle and continue to operate independently under the Tableau brand, led by CEO Adam Selipsky, a former Amazon Web Services executive, Salesforce said in a news release announcing the deal.
The deal promises to escalate the competition between Salesforce and Microsoft, which competes with Tableau through its Power BI data visualization and business intelligence technology. The Redmond-based tech giant already competes heavily with Salesforce’s core business with its Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management technology.
The acquisition price of $15.7 billion is a premium of more than 30 percent over Tableau’s market value of $10.8 billion as of the previous stock market close. The deal is slated to close in the third quarter. The boards of both companies have approved the acquisition, according to the announcement.
Shares of Salesforce fell as much as 5 percent to $169.50 per share following the announcement, while Tableau stock rose more than 35 percent to $170 per share. Wedbush Securities analyst Steve Koenig told CNBC that investors may be concerned that Salesforce could be looking to acquisitions to fuel its growth rather than growing its business organically.
Salesforce provided this chart showing the key stats of the two companies in a slide deck detailing the deal.
Tableau had 4,286 employees worldwide at the end of March, up from 3,663 a year prior. In 2018, Tableau had 2,130 employees in Washington, with a large majority in the Puget Sound region.
More than 86,000 organizations around the world use Tableau, and the merger will help the data visualization company further scale its product. Selipsky expects the merger will bring Tableau millions more users, he said in a statement.
Tableau will remain based in Seattle and continue to operate independently under the Tableau brand, led by CEO Adam Selipsky, a former Amazon Web Services executive, Salesforce said in a news release announcing the deal.